A minute more and the wise woman stooped, and lifting her in her arms, folded her cloak around her.  Instantly she fell asleep, and slept as soft and as soundly as if she had been in her own bed.  She slept till the moon went down; she slept till the sun rose up; she slept till he climbed the topmost sky; she slept till he went down again, and the poor old moon came peaking and peering out once more:  and all that time the wise woman went walking on and on very fast.  And now they had reached a spot where a few fir-trees came to meet them through the moonlight.

At the same time the princess awaked, and popping her head out between the folds of the wise woman’s cloak—­a very ugly little owlet she looked—­saw that they were entering the wood.  Now there is something awful about every wood, especially in the moonlight; and perhaps a fir-wood is more awful than other woods.  For one thing, it lets a little more light through, rendering the darkness a little more visible, as it were; and then the trees go stretching away up towards the moon, and look as if they cared nothing about the creatures below them—­not like the broad trees with soft wide leaves that, in the darkness even, look sheltering.  So the princess is not to be blamed that she was very much frightened.  She is hardly to be blamed either that, assured the wise woman was an ogress carrying her to her castle to eat her up, she began again to kick and scream violently, as those of my readers who are of the same sort as herself will consider the right and natural thing to do.  The wrong in her was this—­that she had led such a bad life, that she did not know a good woman when she saw her; took her for one like herself, even after she had slept in her arms.

Immediately the wise woman set her down, and, walking on, within a few paces vanished among the trees.  Then the cries of the princess rent the air, but the fir-trees never heeded her; not one of their hard little needles gave a single shiver for all the noise she made.  But there were creatures in the forest who were soon quite as much interested in her cries as the fir-trees were indifferent to them.  They began to hearken and howl and snuff about, and run hither and thither, and grin with their white teeth, and light up the green lamps in their eyes.  In a minute or two a whole army of wolves and hyenas were rushing from all quarters through the pillar like stems of the fir-trees, to the place where she stood calling them, without knowing it.  The noise she made herself, however, prevented her from hearing either their howls or the soft pattering of their many trampling feet as they bounded over the fallen fir needles and cones.